The book seemed like a novel that was expanaded from a TV drama pilot outline...The characters other than Julian were never delevoped and what happened to all the characters in Guatamala? The General, the Rabbi and most all Rubios. This is a case where less is not enough. Perhaps with another 200 pages, this could have been a different historical novel.

I prefer my history imbedded in a good story. Jose Raul Bernardo has not disappointed me with SILENT WING; a historical novel based on the life of Cuban patriot/poet Jose Marti. Julian, Bernardo's protagonist is a romantic visionary who must choose between two forces he had always thought identical- truth and duty. The author's rendering of locale is as convincing as Graham Greene's. -Al Gowan, author, SANTIAGO RAG, a novel of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, also available at Amazon.com

I look forward to the opportunity of meeting the author and thanking him for his eloquent expression. His book brought much reflection and analysis of the three internal conflicts that tend to haze our decisions - love, truth, and honor. I want to believe that Julian (Marti) and Sol (Maria) are . . .

Morgan Avery (AKA Shirley Kennett) strikes again! Her characters are so real you feel like you really know them. Be sure to read her 1st 3 books to top this one off! Keep writing, Shirley, no matter what name you have to use! Your fans will always follow your books!

This is the latest installment in the crime/mystery series involving P.J. Gray and Leo Shultz. I have been a fan of this series for years and this is my favorite. All the suspense and action is there and it seemed a little less graphic than her previous novels. I am careful when I start one of Shirley Kennetts books because I know I will not be able to put it down util I finish it! I look forward to the next one!

That's right, Shirley Kennett. This novel is the latest book in the series that features cybersleuth P.J. Gray and veteran police detective Leo Schultz. As in her previous books, Ms. Kennett (a/k/a Morgan Avery) seamlessly blends mystery, suspense, romance, and the right amount of technical information about police procedure.

Although there is a wealth of information provided in this book, it's jumps all over the map in it's presentation, and never really takes a stand on the validity of near death experiences.

The near-death experience is so interesting. I was quite amazed at the children's NDE's since I don't think that they would fabricate any stories. One particular story that I referenced in my book, There Is Eternal Life For Animals, talked about a girl seeing her former deceased dogs in heaven.

The Complete IDIOT'S Guide To Near-Death Experiences by P.M.H. Atwater with David H. Morgan is a must-have for everyone who is interested in the spiritual aspect of death, as well as in the latest developments of our knowledge of spiritual reality. It can be regarded as a easy-to-read encyclopedia on death and afterlife matters. One account about a near-death experience has been titled "Hold on to Your Socks for This One," and the same title can be applied to many of the other survival stories -- all of them are great reads. At the same time, they are classified in a way that expands our understanding of the afterlife. For instance, the authors analyze the differences of how children describe their journeys beyond in comparison to adults. As children are not conditioned by any religious concepts, in their reports darkness isn't always evil. Many children have reported about "the darkness that knows," describing being cradled in a womb-like darkness. The authors recall that light is not always God's light as well. As we know, word "Lucifer" means "light bearer" to begin with. In other words, our dualistic picture of the universe as a battlefield of light and darkness doesn't always hold up. Since the 60's researchers have come across cases of survivors who wanted to report the hellish kind of journeys they experienced. Yet for quite a long time these accounts were suppressed because of the belief that only bad people like murderers go to hell. Regrettably, studies don't confirm it. It is still not quite clear why in near-death situations some people like family oriented community activists found themselves in hell and others in heaven. The belief that a near-death experience produces only positive changes -- needs to undergo a profound revision as well. Some experiencers feed their egos; some change to the extent of alienation; some become difficult to live with... It was high time to reveal more facts about the afterlife and this book definitely leaves us with a considerable amount of new information. In addition, this book gives us an excellent 'further reading' list, a good glossary of pertinent words that otherwise may be confusing and hard to understand, a list of websites and 'get in touch' list of research organizations.

There is one more thing that makes this book special -- its positive energy in spite of its morbid subject. It seems to stem from the authors' liberating intention to be truthful and a profound knowledge of their subject. It was a pleasure to read this book.

This is a great read. I would highly recommend it to anyone anytime - a summer read, a gift...the perfect book to relax with. You lose yourself in a jungle of exotic characters and adventures. It's fantasy and reality interwoven as one. Again, a great read. Makes you think too.

VISUALLY STUNNING, RICH WITH ATMOSPHERE AND INTRIGUING CHARACTERS, INCREDIBLY UNPREDICTABLE EVENTS, FULL OF LOVE, MYSTERY, VIOLENCE, HUMOR AND FANTASY, EVEN GETS DEEPLY PHILOSOPHICAL, FEEL IT CAN BE TURNED INTO A VERY INTERESTING MOVIE

This book takes us to a magical and mystical place where people are unaffected by the outside world. Fascinating characters abound and discuss philosophy and life. One wishes she could enter the book and live in a slower time where ideas and feelings can be explored. Morgan should write more fiction.

This book is a valuable resource of information for city and suburban dwellers, considering the impending Y2K situation at hand. Although the information in this book is important to know in any situation, I purchased it with the intention that it would help my family and I to cope with any Y2K related problems. The book helps to remove a fear of the unknown by explaining how household systems work, as well as how we are all connected to our ecological systems. When you realize that your basic needs for survival are: shelter, water, fire and food, in that order, you can live without all the other "wants". After reading Tom Brown's book, I feel better prepared to handle any emergency.

Where to get food, water, shelter in the city? What happens when there's a disaster? This book is a decent start. Lots of helpful chapters on how to get the essentials, as well as what common edible plants grow in the city.

Another food-for-thought thing you can read is the chapter in Way of the Scout (also by Brown) on his first solo trip to New York City.

Wow...if you had to pick any one book to have by your side during an emergency, this is it! Brown includes tons of practical advice especially relavant for getting prepared for the Year 2000 time change and probable temporary utility breakdowns, not to mention longer term survival techniques. Gets you thinking, that's for sure!

This is a good fictional story, well written but I like his earlier work 'Lives of the Saints' much better, from story development and plot prspectives.

i had originally that that this book would have contained much of the same essence that "live of the saints" had, but i was blown away by the way nino ricci ended Victor's story in "WSHG".
the bizarre fascination with his sister, and longing for a relation with her was ill mannered/nasty , but yet i still continued to finish the novel. the only tick i had about this novel was the ending. it seemed to much of an easy way out, and nino ricci should have thought of sumthing drastic happening to Victor?Vittorio

The atmosphere Ricci creates in WHERE SHE HAS GONE is enveloped in sorrow. As the story of Victor and Rita unfolds, the deep melancholy grows.

Victor and Rita are half-siblings; Rita the product of their mother's affair in her small Italian town while her husband (Victor's father) was in Canada setting the foundation for a new life for his family Over the course of the first two books in the trilogy, their mother dies after giving birth to Rita on the ocean liner bringing them to Canada, and Victor and Rita are raised together for a few years on his father's farm, until Rita is adopted by a nearby couple.

The siblings grow up and grow apart, until the opening of WHERE SHE HAS GONE, where they meet again in Toronto-Victor as a grad student/writer and Rita just starting university. The relationship they develop as adults is complicated and sad, but compelling. Ricci's language is distilled to a very simple, effective style, that suits the mood he creates beautifully.

All three books in the trilogy are highly recommended, but it's not necessary to have read the first two to be moved by the last (though I'm sure after reading WHERE SHE HAS GONE you'll want to).

"Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation." writes Edmund S. Morgan in 1975, and ends this book with the rhetorical question: "Is America still colonial Virginia writ large?"

These are deeply disturbing questions - questions one is compelled to ponder as one reads this lucid and dispassionate presentation of the how primitive accumulation in Virginia at the beginning of the 17th century was replaced a century later by an orderly and opulent society based on slavery. The answer to such questions is not made easy by the realisation that the only other successful republican experiment - the Athenian democracy - blossomed too on a bed of slavery.

Do these questions matter today? Have we not moved on from racism? I'm afraid not. Again the voice of Morgan: "In the republican way of thinking, zeal for liberty and equality could go hand in hand with contempt for the poor and plans for enslaving them." Sounds eerily familiar? Just as today's language used to describe terrorist threats is redolent of the rhetoric that once surrounded the lynching of black bodies. Racism (albeit globalised) is re-visiting the land today, and so are republican virtues and values.

The book is long, and in some ways, too detailed. Morgan delights in the telling particular, and at times one wishes he would not linger on some specifics. But this has a purpose. He wants to show the imperceptible and surreptitious mechanisms by which a society acquires its ugly and immoral traits until they become so natural as to be invisible. Step by step, event by event, law by law a construction emerges that would have horrified its founders. Yet, at the time, it seamed the logical, and the right thing to do.

A strong point in Morgan's narrative is the links he highlights between the developments in Virginia and the Britain's commercial interests, migration policies, population growth and control, state revenue, and political history or thought. One can better appreciate the import of Virginia for Britain and the mother country's fixation and fascination for the North American colonies.

Brash and brutal, Virginian slavery stood openly as godmother at the foundation of the American Republic. Other aspects of slavery also contributed significantly - but as they were indirect, they remained veiled and are hardly recognised even today. New England benefited greatly from its cod trade to the Caribbean, where the product that was found to be unfit for European markets was fed to the slaves, thus freeing up land that otherwise would have been used to sustain them. When will we get a total picture of slavery's import for America's economic foundations?

This is an excellent, in depth survey of Virginia's colonial experience, with an emphasis on how the seemingly contradictory institutions of slavery and equalitarian republicanism developed simultaneously. Indeed, Morgan argues that Virginians' definition of freedom, and their very ability to establish a republican political system, rested upon the creation of African slavery. Morgan shows that institutionalized slavery did not necessarily have to become part of British colonization; the earliest Englishmen to dream of a colonial empire hoped for the establishment of a utopian community in which natives could benefit from enlightened English governance that recognized the inherent rights of all men. Early English explorers even helped to organize revolts against the Spanish by their slaves in Latin America, and while they were motivated by their own interests in doing so, they clearly were willing to treat their slave co-conspirators as equals. However, the utopian phase of colonization died with the failed settlement at Roanoke in the 1580s. The founders of Jamestown quickly learned racism towards the Indians, whom Morgan speculates they goaded into warfare out of frustration at their own inability to support themselves.

The settlement eventually became prosperous as the colonists learned to produce tobacco for market, but it was hardly the ideal society envisioned by the founders. Labor shortages were endemic, as to make a profit planters needed to control a large number of indentured servants. Unfortunately (for the planters), laborers needed only to serve for a limited period before setting up business for themselves, and thus creating competition for the planters. To check this competition, planters made it difficult for freedmen to buy lands of their own (land was plentiful, but acreage with access to shipping had been almost totally monopolized by the large planters), which resulted in freedmen foregoing planting, and becoming lazy, shiftless, and at times rebellious. Moreover, planters treated their indentured servants so poorly that as news of their condition drifted back to England, fewer of the mother country's poor were willing to indenture themselves, especially as the burdens of overpopulation were being reduced at home.

By the 1670s, conditions were ripe for the importation of African slaves, as planters had accumulated capital from past harvests, the supply of indentured servants had slackened, life expectancy had increased to the point where buying a servant for life was cost efficient, and the increasingly rebellious nature of English freedmen convinced the colony's leaders that to encourage growth in the ranks of Virginia's poor could be disastrous. At first, African imports faced restrictions no different from those of white servants, except that their terms of service were fixed for life, and poor whites and black slaves even formed friendships, recognizing the commonality of their interests. This sense of camaraderie alarmed the colony's leaders, who early in the 18th century sought to differentiate the interests of black and white laborers, codifying special discriminations against blacks and fostering a racist attitude towards them. Lower class whites were now allowed to rise in social and economic status, since planters needed them to think in terms of the unity of whites as a social class, rather than in terms of economic class. At the same time, the new emphasis in England upon legislative supremacy and the 'rights of Englishmen' carried over to Virginia, leading planter-legislators to curry the favor of lower class voters.

Popular political participation provided the roots of republicanism, as racial slavery allowed whites across social classes to see themselves as political and social equals. Poverty was seen as a threat to republicanism, since the poor would owe their votes to their creditors and benefactors, and must therefore be kept out of the political system. Racial slavery was the perfect way to identify the poor and keep them subdued and out of politics, thus ensuring the liberty of property owners of all economic levels. Blacks took on (at least in the eyes of whites) the attributes that had always been assigned to England's poor, and identifying those negative qualities with race only made it easier for committed republicans to justify their inequality. Thus, in Virginia, contempt for the poor became contempt for blacks, and while northerners could decry slavery, they could also accept that republicanism rested upon keeping the poor and landless down.

This scholarly examination of the roots of slavery in colonial virginia connects its development to the social economic and political environment as it evolved over a century and a half. Very interesting reading on a complex subject.

This is a fascinating book, but I was dismayed by Wilson's anti-Elizabeth bias. He refers to her as a "hideous old woman" responsible for the death of "many worthy young people" like Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Essex. Worthy young people...those two? Mary Stuart was singularly lacking in common sense, and, after catching Mary red-handed plotting against her numerous times, Elizabeth had little choice politically but to execute her. As for Essex, he was a spoiled egomaniac who bit the hand that fed him. Wilson also does himself no service by referring to Robert Cecil as "the little secretary Cecil" or by repeating without caveat a discredited story about how Essex's ring was not given to Elizabeth.

Books on Shakespeare roughly seem to fall into two categories: Standard scholarly books that downplay the man and focus on the plays and ingenious, entertianing books by frequently learned amateurs of anti-stratfordian theories of authorship. Anti-stratfordians have an advantage with the popular reading public; whereas academics are content to deal with texts as if they have no referents, laypeople necessarily have to ask (as William Paley said in his "natural theology) what kind of man wrote these plays. Anti-stratfordians are all too willing to oblige.

Furthermore the field is fairly well uncontested as practically all academics consider anti-stratfordian theories as beneath their contempt. This is a shame because generally they are entirely worthy of contempt. Ian Wilson is educated amateur, with the sort of background one associates with anti-stratfordians. He summarizes and interprets the available evidence and comes to some remarkable conclusions.

Best of all, his is not an "anti-anti-stratfordian rant" he concentrates on considering the "stratford man" not knocking other candidates. But the position of there being an "authorship problem" is made untenable. Particularly when read in conjuction with Matus' SHAKESPEARE IN FACT which addresses subsequent assessments of shakespeare (culminating in romantic "bardolatry") as well as a dissection of the claims for Oxford. This even though there are plenty of "arguably"'s, "almost certian"'s, "likely"'s that stud the text which the loyal opposition will make much of.

The one substantian objection is that Wilson argues for the likelihood of a position (for example the identity of the "dark lady") and then frequently treats it as establish fact. This is a chief vice of anti-strafordians A few more qualifiers would have enhanced the book's credibility.

Being a Shakespearean actor, I am very interested in consuming any information concerning the bard from critiques of the plays and sonnets to varied information about his life. Usually though its a chore to ponder through overblown scholarly disertaions on the works that totally ignore the dimension of the presentation and performance. Even more so with dull biographers who grapple with sparse facts on Shakespeare's life and who eventually draw a very incomplete view of the man. That all changed in reading this book! Ian Wilson paints the most complete portrait of the bard that I have ever read. Piecing together bits of direct and surrounding evidence, selections of the plays and political intriques of the time Wilson writes an exciting narrative that reads more like a screenplay then a dissertation. I found myself dieing to know what happend next as his life unfolded. Here Shakespeare appears as a true Human being and not the stuff of half baked legend and places emotion and motivation behind the writing of the plays. It describes in detail his dealings with the high members of the court of England, rising through the ranks of the theatrical world and gives a poignant glimpse into the man himself and dispels any allusion to the authorship question, especially from Edward De Vere. Given the success of "Shakespeare in Love", Hollywood should take this book and fashion a mini-series on his life. There is more than enough drama and mystery in these pages for three films. Definitely a great read for any scholar or Shakespearean actor that seek to relish the rich legacy that Will left to our culture.

Provides an interesting insight into a little-known aspect of the Civil War: the plight of the Copperheads, Northern Democrats with Southern sympathies, caught between North and South. A well-researched, authentic, and well-written novel about the adventures of one of Morgan's guerrilla cavalry on their famous and daring raid into Indiana and Ohio. It evokes a sense of the tragedy of a decent man who, in the defense of principle, eventually descends into the depths of brutality and murder and the loss of all he holds dear. The reader is conveyed into the time and place with great intensity. A very good read.

This book is packed with adventure. If you know anything about the Ohio Valley you can relate to the towns and cities that are in Morgan's path. History rich, this book brings to life a few of the soldiers and the life they lead in 1863. A must read for history buffs.

This book was fascinating. After living in the southern Indiana area I could picture the path of the raiders and their pursuers with ease from the accurate landscape descriptions. I loved the descriptions of places, people and events. Jed is warm, caring and patient. I found myself becoming frustrated with Cal and gladdened at the decisions made in regard to Sarah. Ursula was my favorite, of course. Fierce loyalty and determination were hers even when things seemed at their worst. The ending was priceless! PERFECT for the imaginative mind!
This is a very enjoyable, easy to read history lesson with a bit of romance entwined in it's pages. Ol' Bob, ya did good!

This book has wonderful photos of every type of weather from clouds, sun dogs, rainbows, hail, freezing rain, and on and on. Each description is only a page long and includes a photograph. It's easy to understand and doesn't get into too much detail. My 6 year old, although she didn't understand the text, got this book out of the library and liked it so much she wanted a copy of her own -- she loved looking at the different photos. And as an adult, I had to agree with her, it's great just to thumb through as well as read the specifics.

It has been said "people complain about the weather but never do anything about it." Perhaps that's because they don't know much about it. This book will help you learn more about our weather. I was looking for a book that explained about various weather phenomenon and came across it. I loved it not only because of the pictures and descriptions in the last chapter on various weather types (different kinds of fogs, clouds, storms, precipitation, optical effects, etc), but also for lost of other information covered in the book, but also because the book's other chapters also contained so much excellent information. Subjects like Understanding the Weather (which covers the atmosphere, sources of weather, global wind patterns and different kinds of winds, frontal systems, etc.), Forecasting the Weather (obviously that has never been an exact science!), Changing the Weather, and also a secion on different climates and how humankind and animals adapt.

There are lots of pictures and diagrams in this book which help to explain key weather concepts. One day I will force myself to read this book cover to cover instead of getting sidetracked at all the gorgeous illustrations and pictures in this book, every time I pick it up to read it.

I love this book all about weather, how it occurs, what makes our planet hum. It has helped me read the sky far more clearly & understand daily forecasts. It is filled with gorgeous photographs & easily interpreted diagrams. I never knew there were so many forms of fog!